The present disclosure relates generally to portable urinal systems and methods of collecting urine. In particular, systems and methods including a handheld urinal and a separate collection reservoir are described.
For a long-haul truck driver who is on the road, access to a convenient restroom facility is generally not available when the need to urinate arises. In such situations, the first task is to get the vehicle safely parked alongside the road. The driver will then relieve him/herself, and up until now, the two most common options have been either to step outside the vehicle or to use some sort of ad-hoc container as a urinal. This scenario, repeated thousands of times on a daily basis, carries many undesirable aspects.
To begin with, just finding a safe place to park can take some time, and during that interval, the increasing need for relief introduces a level of distraction that can seriously endanger both the driver and other nearby vehicles. Once parked, exiting the cab not only exposes the driver to the risk of bodily harm from other vehicles, but if at night and/or in a remote location, the security of the driver, the rig, and the cargo may all be seriously compromised. Outside urination not only casts the entire trucking industry in a negative light, but with current public concern for the environment, drivers who use this option will increasingly find themselves in legal trouble.
For the driver who prefers to stay in the cab, there are very few satisfactory options. Currently there is virtually no commercially available product specifically designed as a urinal to be used in the cab. A few products claim to serve this purpose, but none of them appear to be very practical solutions. There is a group patents including U.S. Pat. No. 8,181,284, U.S. Pat. No. 5,551,097. US20030140409, and US20080163411 that are apparently designed for the trucking industry. A common design characteristic is that they all incorporate a receiver (funnel, catheter) that is connected to the reservoir via a flexible hose. There are several practical drawbacks to the use of a hose—e.g. incompatibility with the day-to-day activities in the sleeper cab space, increased points of possible leakage, and greater difficulty in maintaining the overall hygiene of the system. It also appears that the implementation of all of these designs requires permanent modifications to the sleeper cab—something not tolerated by most trucking companies.
A web search yields references to the PIT STOP® and to the GOPILOT®. Neither of these would require cab modification, but similar to the previous group, each of these incorporates a receiver-hose-reservoir design. The GOPILOT® system appears to only have a capacity of only 1 gallon, and it's not seen as particularly useful to the average trucker. See also U.S. Pat. No. 8,650,669, which appears to describe the GOPILOT® system.
The teachings herein, which are directed to the concept of two distinctly separate containers (Urinal and Reservoir) has not been seen before. To the objectives of hygiene, convenience, security, and simplicity, the embodiments disclosed herein are a major departure from all of the other applicable prior art.
In the absence of any viable alternatives, the container of choice is usually a plastic beverage container of 1-4 liter capacity. Because they were never designed for this purpose, there are several ways in which such containers are very subject to spillage. Also because they are often used to accumulate urine over a period of several days, they are vulnerable to the build-up of odor and infectious bacteria levels. Since there is no generally acceptable means for disposal, these containers are often discarded along highway shoulders, and known to the general public as “truck bombs.”
The current situation can also result in negative health impacts. Frequent prolonged periods of having to “hold it” are known to increase the likelihood of bladder and kidney disorders. Also in order to avoid the previously described situations, drivers will often minimize liquid intake and thereby incur problems associated with inadequate hydration.